“Practicing Public Scholarship.” Public Philosophy Journal 1, no. 1 (2018). https://doi.org/10.25335/m5/ppj.1.1-1.
Situating the Public Philosophy Journal at the intersection of philosophy and questions of public concern, this essay articulates how the journal hopes to practice public scholarship through a formative review process designed to create communities capable of enriching public life.
This is the inaugural essay in the inaugural issue of the Public Philosophy Journal.
“Who Let the Dogs Out? Tracking the Philosophical Life Among the Wolves and Dogs of Plato’s Republic.” In Plato’s Animals: Gadflies, Snakes, Stingrays, Swans, and Other Philosophical Beasts, edited by Jeremy Bell and Michael Naas, (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2015). Available in Open Access Format: http://hdl.handle.net/2022/19576
Identifying a sustainable model for open access publishing in the humanities is a challenge that calls for creative experimental solutions. The model that sustains the growth of open access scholarship in the sciences is rooted in federal funding mechanisms that are unavailable at the same scale for the humanities. This situation requires innovative collaboration between humanities scholars and publishers to develop sustainable ways to provide open access to humanities scholarship at scale.
I am happy to report here on one such collaborative experiment in open access publishing in the humanities. Read More
@cplong: Advocacy for Open Access in the humanities is gaining momentum. I myself have committed to reviewing articles for Open Access journals and am working with colleagues to develop a new model of open access online publishing in philosophy via the Public Philosophy Journal. But it’s easy to advocate for OA, especially for established scholars, but what are the wider implications of OA in the humanities, and what sustainable funding models can be identified that would make more scholarship openly accessible to a wider public?
Recently I was asked by the editors of a journal whose mission and scholarship I support and respect to review a book by a scholar I very much admire. In the past, I would have accepted the invitation without a second thought and proceeded to read the book and develop a review. Not this time.
It was paragraph three, section b) of the Contributor Publishing Agreement from Indiana University Press that gave me pause.
In it I read that I would not be permitted to post the final published version of my article, “Who Let the Dogs Out? Tracking the Philosophical Life among the Wolves and Dogs of Plato’s Republic,” on my website until a full year after the date of its publication.
To be published or to be read, that is the question scholars increasingly face.
Although publications with reputable university presses or journals continue to be the cornerstone of the tenure and promotion process, many remain inaccessible to a broad audience, bound up, as they often are, in paper volumes or locked behind paywalls required by the outmoded business practices of scholarly publishers.
Take this recent experience as illustrative of the situation scholars committed to Open Access face.
As we sought to map out the design and functionality of the PPJ with colleagues at Matrix a few weeks ago, we began to suggest how a disciplinary economy of an open peer review might be navigated in ways that at once ensure rigor and maximize collegiality. Recognizing that peer review itself is an important scholarly activity, this post outlines the contours of one aspect of the PPJ user score, the “Collegiality Index.”
320 Linton Hall 479 West Circle Drive East Lansing, MI 48824
© 2018 Christopher P. Long. Hosted by Reclaim Hosting.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.